Why would you copy the whole thing, without even any criticisms or insights, into your little local newspaper and actually call it an editorial? He at least acknowledges he received it in an e-mail forward and that he isn't confident it can be trusted, but, leaving aside the question of how it even then makes a legitimate newspaper column, why do you present something you lack any reason to trust in a way that implies it's factual?

This guy has one answer for that question. [Dammit, that guy, I meant that question rhetorically.] He pastes the whole thing into a page on his site without comment other than this, appended to the end:

Gene’s CAUTION: Yeah, this is just another bit of creative writing (you really didn’t believe ALL these, did you?) that has been passed around via e-mails for who knows how long. But what the heck, a little silliness never hurt anyone…

Gene. C'mon. I like silliness. The Onion. Spamusement. Daily Dinosaur. And this, this, this, and this. But yes, if you look at the links in that first paragraph, a lot of them do appear to really believe those. So why propagate it? Let's not lead people to believe fiction to be fact if we can help it, OK?

I was going to each of the claims in that list in a separate post, probably linking toWord Detective a lot (who here presents a different origin for "chairman" than the thing about one chair in a house and everyone else eating sitting on the floor). After all, I find a lot more credible someone who actually puts his name on his work, especially with all the published book and the newspaper column (which he actually writes himself) than some unsourced piece that could have been written by anyone.